Law enforcement, the military and other government agencies are commonly faced with the challenge of trying to identify which, if any, dangerous homemade explosives (“HMEs”) someone may be trying to formulate from a given set of chemical ingredients, as for example those found at the scene of a crime, or a raid (the Observed Materials).
As there may be many potential precursor materials found, and there are many explosive formulations, each with multiple primary and secondary source materials, that a would-be bomb maker may be using, this task is both analytically difficult and extremely time consuming to accomplish, and virtually impossible to do at the scene of the raid or seizure, except in the case of the very simplest of explosive formulations, such as ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, which combine to form the binary explosive commonly referred to as ANFO. This problem has significantly hindered the responsible soldiers' or law enforcement officers' performance of their duties in this regard, for many years. Previous to this invention, making an assessment about what HMEs, if any, had been contemplated by the owners of a cache of chemicals required the person seeking such an assessment to send the inventory of materials to one of a small number of explosives experts at an agency like the FBI or BATF, where the expert would attempt to intuit, from his or her experience, what the would-be bomb makers were up to, in terms of intended end-product explosives. So far as applicant is aware, no even moderately comprehensive database of all known explosives precursors existed—the closest thing known to the applicant is a small 2-sided card handed out by the FBI, entitled “Improvised Explosives Threat Card,” listing fewer than 20 commonly seen HME's and only their, typically two to four, primary preferred ingredients.
With the rise of terrorism and the Global War On Terror, U.S. and allied military forces, and other military and law enforcement organizations, and even emergency responders, have compelling operational reasons to be concerned about potential HME formulations. A typical scenario may involve a raid on a location or facility where the raiding forces come across a cache of chemicals. The ability to virtually combine these chemical components, on the spot, and thereby rapidly and accurately predict what were the most likely explosive formulations, if any, being manufactured (e.g., TNT, TATP, ANFO etc.), would provide valuable, timely, insight and situational awareness that is not currently available.
What is needed is a method and an apparatus for performing that virtual combination of discovered potential HME ingredients, so as to quickly and accurately predict the various explosive formulations whose manufacture was or may have been contemplated by the materials' users, along with an assessment of the relative likelihood of each such possible outcome, and to make that prediction and assessment immediately available to the user, in a readily understandable form. Preferably, it should be possible to perform the analysis and reach those conclusions right at the scene of the chemical cache under investigation.